News & Articles

This is odd: America’s laws to deter corporate crime actually force victims to help subsidize the criminals.
Follow the bouncing ball here: First, a court orders a corporation to pay punitive damages to a victim of its criminal acts; second, the corporate offender pays up, then merrily subtracts a big chunk of that payment from its income tax, effectively taking money out of our public treasury; third, while the criminal is counting its tax break, the victim is notified that the punitive damage money he or she received from the corporation will be taxed as “regular income;” fourth, that means a big chunk of the victim’s payment effectively goes to replenish the public money the corporate villain subtracted.
Bad enough that corporate-financed lawmakers legalize such encouragement of criminality, but corporate-coddling judges are playing the same disgraceful game by drastically reducing the amounts that juries order corporations to pay. In a Montana case, for example, a jury awarded $240 million in punitive damages to the families of three people, including two teenagers, killed in a car crash. The deaths were blamed on a steering defect that South Korean automaker, Hyundai, was found to have known about and “recklessly” ignored for more than a decade. But a district judge has since supplanted the jury’s ruling with her own. While declaring that Hyundai’s “reprehensibility” certainly warrants a sizeable punishment, she cut the corporation’s punitive payment down to $73 million.
Hello – that’s not punishment to a $79 billion a year car giant, it’s pocket change. Why would Hyundai executives quit putting corporate profits over people’s lives if that’s their “punishment?
“When Company Is Fined, Taxpayers Often Share Bill,” The New York Times, February 4, 2015.

Don’t TPP on me

Like some Vaudeville shtick, Barack Obama keeps blathering that a huge flaw in his global trade scam doesn’t exist – but then the flaw hits him in the face like a big cream pie.
The President’s trade scam is called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and it’s a corporate boondoggle loaded with gotchas that hurt workers, consumers, our environment, and others. But its most damnable flaw is that it would allow foreign corporations to sue the US in corporate-run tribunals to make us change or even repeal any of our laws that might pinch their profits.
No, no, shouts Obama, “there is no chance, zero chance” of that happening. But – Splat! Splat! – reality has smacked him in the face with two cream pies. Using an earlier trade scam, the World Trade Organization has ruled not once, but twice this year that two US laws must be repealed or modified to satisfy the profit goals of corporations in Mexico and Canada. On May 12, a WTO trade tribunal ruled that our “dolphin-safe” tuna labeling law (which lets you and me know that the tuna we buy has not been fished with nets that trap and kill dolphins) violates the free-trade “right” of Mexican tuna fleets to use the cheaper, dolphin-slaughtering nets.
And on May 18, another WTO tribunal hurled a second cream pie. This one smacks “COOL,” an American consumer law that requires country-of-origin-labeling on meat products, so your family and mine can know where the meat we buy comes from. Our Congress passed this sensible right-to-know law, our courts have upheld it, 92 percent of Americans support it – but a group of corporate lawyers on a WTO tribunal has overruled us.
Now Obama wants to saddle us with his TPP, creating more corporate kangaroo courts that’ll have even greater power to usurp our sovereignty. To tell him “Don’t TPP on me!” go to www.TradeWatch.org.
“WTO Orders U.S. to Gut U.S. Consumer Country-of-Origin Meat Labeling Policy, Further Complicating Obama Fast Track Push by Spotlighting How Trade Pacts Can Undermine U.S. Consumer, Environmental Policies,” www.citizen.org, May 18, 2015

Willie’s Reserve

With marijuana prohibition finally ending in states and cities across the land – including full legalization and/or commercialization in Alaska, Colorado, Washington State, Oregon, and Washington, DC – who better than our friend Willie Nelson to lead the way for weed quality and social responsibility?
The iconic musician and intrepid fighter for justice has announced that he will market his own marijuana brand, “Willie’s Reserve,” and open a group of stores selling top-quality pot and paraphernalia. “I feel like I was buying so much of it, it’s time to start selling it back!” Willie said of his new weed venture. “I am looking forward to working with the best growers in Colorado and Washington to make sure our product is the best on the market.” A tireless champion of small farmers, civil liberties, the environment, common sense, and the common good, he plans to start rolling out his stores and products (including hemp goods) this year, and he’ll expand further as state laws allow. In the typical Willie way, the stores will be “the anti-Walmart model,” with a core purpose of helping expand the market for small, energy-efficient, environmentally sound growers.
Over the years I have cited Willie’s work in calling for legalization and restoration of hemp farming in America. I’ve also called repeatedly for an end to the Orwellian, Kafkaesque drug war that has criminalized the cannabis equivalent of cocktail hour – 750,000 people are arrested each year for marijuana-related offenses.
And now, I salute the innumerable grassroots activists who’ve steadily pushed America from the darkness of marijuana madness to being able to light up a Willie without getting busted! Find out more at Marijuana Policy Project www.mpp.org, and also at NORML www.norml.org.

Proud “partners” corporatize our parks

While we Americans celebrate the 100th anniversary of our National Park Service, America’s so-called “leaders” are aggressively commercializing our parks, converting these jewels of the common good into just another corporate cash cow.
This started with “co-branding” agreements, rationalized by NPS officials as “aligning the economic and historical legacies” of parks with advertisers. In other words, they are selling the Park Service’s proud public brand... as well as its soul.
First in line was Coca-Cola. In 2010, the multibillion-dollar colossus became a “Proud Partner” with NPS by making a mere $2.5 million tax-deductible donation. In return, Coke got exclusive rights to use park logos in its ads – and it also was allowed to veto an NPS plan to ban sales of bottled water in the Grand Canyon park. Disposable plastic bottles are that park’s biggest source of trash, but Coke owns the Dasani brand of water, so bye-bye ban. Public outrage forced officials to reverse this crass move, but NPS’ integrity has yet to recover.
Then this April, the park service abandoned its policy of rejecting any ties to alcohol products when Anheuser-Busch also became a Proud NPS Partner by making a $2.5 million tax-deductible “gift.” In turn, its Budweiser brand was given the Statue of Liberty. Not literally, but symbolically – Bud now has the right to plaster Lady Liberty, the iconic symbol of the USA itself, on its cans.
Creeping commercialization of our public parks is not creeping, it’s running rampant! For example, take a whiff of this: In return for becoming a Proud Partner, Air Wick was authorized to market a new fragrance collection that it advertises as being “uniquely inspired by America’s national parks.”